In today's environment of peer-to-peer file sharing and music piracy over the Internet, copyright protection is of the utmost concern for content owners and distributors. Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology, which includes content packaging, distribution, and licensing processes, helps content owners protect their digital media and manage its use by customers. DRM content packaging, distribution, and licensing process begins with encoding digital media content into a file, for example, an Advanced Streaming Format (ASF) file. ASF allows multiple different streams of digital data to be stored into a single file. Since each stream of digital data corresponds to a single type of media such as audio, video, metadata, and so on, an encoded file may consist of multiple independent sources of digital content.
Existing DRM processes encrypt the encoded file and define one or more business rules. The business rules indicate end-user licensing terms or options for accessing the media content in the encrypted file. Existing DRM processes typically provide a user interface (UI) for the content owner or an administrative entity to define these business rules. The business rules and information for decrypting the encrypted file are communicated to a license issuer. The encrypted file is distributed to consumers through the Internet, CD, or other conventional means. Consumers are then issued a license via the license issuer to decode and use the contents of the encrypted file according to the corresponding defined business rules. Once acquired, a license provides the license holder with access to all portions of the encrypted file. This is the case, regardless of how many separate data streams such as audio, video, and metadata streams are represented within the encrypted file.
Since digital media rights are of substantial value, a content owner may consider one file data stream or portion to be of independent value as compared to a different data portion of the same file. For example, the content owner may consider the video portion of a file to be of higher or independent value as compared to an audio portion in the file. Unfortunately, existing DRM techniques and encoded data file formats do not allow the content owner to respectively differentiate the licensing value of one file data portion from another file data portion. Rather all file data portions are collectively licensed as a single entity. That is all file portions can be licensed according to one or multiple defined licensing schemes (business rules) or no file portions are licensed.
The following systems and methods address these and other limitations of conventional DRM systems and techniques, which require content owners that desire to secure digital rights to file contents to license multiple potentially separately valuable aspects of the file as a single collective entity.